politics, theory, action

Posts categorized "movies"

December 31, 2013

A few weeks ago when Paul and I were in NYC for the baptism of the child of some friends (by Reverend Billy), we ran into some acquaintances. The acquaintances are men in their late twenties. We ran into them around NYU. I made strained small-talk with one while Paul chatted with the other.

The guy I was talking to is a hedge fund manager.

I didn't push it. Really. After covering sports, the weather, the few people we know in common, he asks about my kids. I reply that my son is going to McGill. He's impressed and adds, "a lot of guys in my firm went to McGill." I smile sweetly, "The one thing I hope my son will never, ever, become is a hedge fund manager."

The guy laughs uneasily, "Well, he should be able to make his own choices."

"But not that."

"What's so wrong with being a hedge fund manager?"

I look at him like he must either have severe brain damage or be from another planet (both, I think, are true, the effects of capitalist excess). "Umm, the role of the finance sector in the intensification of economic inequality in the US and the larger global economic crisis?"

He says, "Well, that's your opinion."

"No. It's a fact."

"Well, some would disagree."

"Then they are wrong."

He stares at me. I offer, "My most recent book is The Communist Horizon." He grabs the other guy and insists that they have to go. Now.

The next evening while a blizzard engulfed the city I sat in a bar with a socialist friend a few years younger than the other guys. After I recounted the conversation from the night before, he tells me a similar story. A few weeks earlier, he was chatting with a woman at a party. He said something critical of Wall Street and she became uneasy, volunteering that she worked in finance, that people who go into debt have no one but themselves to blame, that anyone who works hard can easily save enough money to have a good life, etc. He described some of the challenges faced by his working class parents, tying them to the structural role of debt and unemployment for capitalism. She became increasingly uncomfortable, defensive, and angry, ultimately storming off.

The bright side of these stories of twenty-something shame: the fact that they feel it. They aren't bragging and gloating. This isn't Jamie Dimon and his gloating Christmas card. Rather, these twenty-somethings quickly cave under the realization of the wrong of inequality. They might try, initially, to parrot the capitalist ideological clap-trap that protects them, but they feel its holes. They don't believe it anymore, even if they want to. Jamie Dimon and his ilk do their best to patch up the the image of extreme wealth, "look how fun it is!," but their deafness to the tone of the times betrays their underlying desperation. Misfires are symptoms of their crumbling position. They won't be able to hold it much longer.

I lived in NYC in the mid-eighties. I worked for a year in a low-paid publishing job and then went to graduate school. A few friends and a lot of acquaintances had gone to work on Wall Street (Karen's Ho's Liquidated is a great ethnography on this pipeline). They were investment bankers and traders. Some dealt in junk bonds. From the outside, it looked like a wild scene, not as extreme as "The Wolf of Wall Street" but not so far off, either.

The difference is that in the mid-eighties, these guys were shameless, masters of the universe, Tom Wolfe would call them in Bonfire of the Vanities. The Gordon Gekko line, "greed is good," wasn't a critique, it was a flag, a banner.

This flag is now in tatters. The banner has fallen.

Now even those who want to be Wall Street's gekkos and wolves can't. They don't believe anymore that the rest of us believe that they are winners, that they are the smartest guys in the room, that they somehow deserve or have earned their immensely unequal share of the common surplus. They know that the rest of us think that are thieves, extortionists, criminals. A little shame has crept in. That's why the twenty-somethings got angry.

"The Wolf of Wall Street" lays bear the injunction to enjoy underlying the last thirty years of financialization. The ambiguity of the movie comes from our relation to this enjoyment. Does it incite our desire, does it arouse us, making us against our better selves in fact want to be like them, want to have what they have? Does it disgust us, arousing our indignation? Does it blend the two together so that we find ourselves with no place to stand (sex and drugs are fun! I'm no conservative, moralistic, prude!)? And, if it does any of these does the movie end up coming too much to the assistance of Jamie Dimon and his ilk? Maybe the audience for the film is those twenty-something finance types who want to rid themselves of the shame that shadows their work in the sector that is killing the world.

Criticisms of the movie for its sexism miss the mark. The movie enacts obscenity. It enjoins excess and this injunction always is at a cost to someone. Someone is exploited (or excluded--it's a white movie--or beaten up--lots of homophobia). The excess has to be understood as inseparable from Wall Street. Nothing to be proud of here. They should all be ashamed.

March 16, 2013

Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the point of view of the unconscious, but he did not see clearly, he did not see that the unconscious iutself was fundamentally a crowd. He was myopic and hard of hearing; it mistook crowds for a single person.

Deleuze and Guattari read the Wolf Man against Freud and his unifying mistakes, his rendering of singular what is multiple. They invoke Canetti on crowd (mass) and packs, noting that there is no more equality or any less hierarchy in packs than in masses even as they differ in kind. For them, the pack is schizo, with members exposed (no one has their back). In contrast, the position of the mass subject is paranoid "with all the identifications of the individual with the group, the group with the leader, and the leader with the group; be securely embedded in the ,mass, get close to the center, never be at the edge except in the line of duty."

Their move is odd. They criticize Canetti's crowd as if it were Freud's. That is, they've already criticized Freud, debunked him even. They've moved on. But they regress and write as if Canetti's crowd were Freud's when it's not. In Canetti's, there is no duty, no center, no necessary leader, no identification.

August 09, 2012

Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are given only a year more to live. To survive any longer, they must earn extra time. The decadent rich have centuries of empty time available to fritter away, while the poor are always only days or hours away from death. In Time is, in effect, the first science fiction film about precarity – a condition that describes an existential precidament as much as it refers to a particular way of organising work.

At the most simple level, precarity is one consequence of the “post-Fordist” restructuring of work that began in the late 1970s: the turn away from fixed, permanent jobs to ways of working that are increasingly casualised. Yet even those within relatively stable forms of employment are not immune from precarity. Many workers now have to periodically revalidate their status via systems of “continuous professional development”; almost all work, no matter how menial, involves self-surveillance systems in which the worker is required to assess their own performance. Pay is increasingly correlated to output, albeit an output that is no longer easily measurable in material terms.

For most workers, there is no such thing as the long term. As sociologist Richard Sennett put it in his book The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, the post-Fordist worker “lives in a world marked … by short-term flexibility and flux … Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connection.” (30) Throughout history, humans have learned to come to terms with the traumatic upheavals caused by war or natural disasters, but “[w]hat’s peculiar about uncertainty today,” Sennett points out, “is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism.”

It isn’t only work that has become more tenuous. The neoliberal attacks on public services, welfare programmes and trade unions mean that we are increasingly living in a world deprived of security or solidarity. The consequence of the normalisation of uncertainty is a permanent state of low-level panic. Fear, which attaches to particular objects, is replaced by a more generalised anxiety, a constant twitching, an inability to settle. The uncertainty of work is intensified by digital communication technology. As soon as there is email, there are no longer working hours nor a workplace. What characterises the present moment more than our anxious checking – of our messages, which may bring opportunities or demands (often both at the same time), or, more abstractly, of our status, which, like the stock market is constantly under review, never finally resolved?

June 11, 2011

I've semi-intended to write posts over the last week or so, but everyday life (and trying to read) has intervened. In lieu of a post, then, a list of assorted items, that may have become posts, but didn't.

1. Books I'm reading: Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism (highly recommended--particularly for a compelling critique of 'leftism' among contemporary European intellectuals); Lar Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? In Context (very long, really interesting); Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject (translated by Bruno Bosteels; his introduction is crucial; what strikes me about the book is the substantial overlap between Badiou's text, first published in 1982, and Zizek's writing in the period from, say, Indivisible Remainder through Revolution at the Gates; I don't think Zizek was familiar with this work of Badiou's--I could be wrong--but the combinations of Lenin and Lacan take them in similar directions, directions that are more militant than both take after, say, 2004 or so.

2. The sky is falling: maybe the left should hope that the Republicans prevent the debt ceiling from being raised; the drawback here is that our dissarray could mean that the Right/Tea Party/wingnuts go in to the chaos with an upperhand.

3. Verso is going to publish my book, The Communist Horizon. The manuscript is due September 1. The book will probably be out in Fall 2012.

4. Summer of strength: what would it take to build a powerful left organization in the US this summer? Unify multiple movement and party groups (Greens, Working Families, United for Peace and Justice,), connect students groups from across the country, have days of simultaneous vandalism/destruction of property (smashing bank windows, wreaking havoc in malls), bring together unemployed people for local action meetings, plan an occupation of the Capitol.

5. What do we want? Abolition of private property (not personal property); abolition of all debts; abolition of speculation in commodities; abolition of stock exchange and all financial exchanges; abolition of investment banking; nationalization of commercial banks to form a national savings and loans; nationalization of insurance, pharmaceutical, oil/gas, computer/IT, automative, chemical, transportation, industries; nationalization of agriculture and end to factory farming; end homelessness; seize all assets in excess of 250,00 $ for redistribution; unlimited free public education; end foreign wars; guaranteed uniform individual income; develop local/national sustainable manufacturing and energy programs. The abstract version: the direct instantiation of universal egalitarianism: from each according to ability, to each according to need. It's important to get some good slogans for banners that could bridge the gap between the abstract version and the details.

6. Super 8 is a terrific summer movie.

7. Ignore the Right. Ignore the msm. They make us stupid and misdirect our energies. What matters is building unity around an active vision of communism for us.

June 03, 2010

My favorite is when Samantha, the oldest of the four female lead characters who is on a date with a Danish architect in a hookah bar in Abu Dhabi, begins to suck on the mouthpiece of the water pipe as if it was a penis. When the aroused architect stands up, you can see the outlines of his erect penis through his trousers, thus infuriating observant Muslims at the next table. If this is not the thing that you would find funny, then don’t bother seeing the movie. I can say this, however. The movie is about as potent a weapon against Islam as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s “Road to Morocco”. Indeed, this is where SATC #2 was filmed.

Oddly enough, mainstream film critics have rallied around this question of Islamophobia in a way that is truly remarkable given the steady stream of poison that comes out of Hollywood about “the war on terror”, including “The Kingdom”, “Body of Lies”, and “Hurt Locker”, the truly rotten recipient of the Oscar for best picture in 2009.

The other thing that struck me as hypocritical was the outrage over the lavish lifestyle of the heroines, starting with their staying in a $22,000 per night hotel. The NY Times’s A.O. Scott assumes the posture of James Agee in finding the movie insensitive to our current economic crisis: “But the ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense.” Scott also appears to have read Karl Marx at some point in his life based on this observation: “The Emirate to which the four friends repair is an oasis of gilded luxury in a world that has grown a little ambivalent about unbridled commodity fetishism.”

Excuse me. Am I missing something? If there’s any media outlet that should not be talking about “unexamined privilege” and “unbridled commodity fetishism”, it is the NY Times that is almost singlehandedly responsible for backing the yuppification of the island of Manhattan. This is a newspaper with society pages gushing over $10 million weddings and whose restaurant reviews are strictly devoted to venues that will cost you $150 per meal.

Leaving aside the obvious political charges of Islamophobia and “unexamined privilege”, there is an element of the hatred directed against the movie that is a bit beneath the surface in most reviews. It does raise its nasty head above the surface briefly, however, in Scott’s review where he writes, ” the party girls of yesteryear are tomorrow’s Ladies Who Lunch.” For those who know something about the life-style of elderly Manhattan dowagers, the phrase “Ladies Who Lunch” is a clear reference to Scott’s disappointment that the movie treats women in their 40s and 50s as if they still had a libido. The wiki on the term states:

Ladies who lunch is a phrase to describe slim, well-off, old-money, well-dressed women who meet for lunch socially, normally during the working week. Typically, the women involved are married and non-working. Normally the lunch is in a restaurant, perhaps in a department store during shopping. Sometimes there is the pretext of raising money for charity.

Rex Reed, a gay film critic and a colleague in NYFCO, writes what A.O. Scott and other more respectable scribes will not, for fear of being accused—rightly—of ageism and sexism:

The women-too old now to pout, whine and babble about their wet dreams, affluent and successful for reasons that are never clear-are all vain, narcissistic, selfish, superficial and really rather stupid. The actors work hard to perform triage, but they’ve been playing these roles so long they’ve grown moss.

There are some out there that have figured this angle out, most notably a certain Balk who wrote:

My theory is that the radical aversion to the current installment of Sex
and the City says something about the way we look at elderly women in
modern American society. We would prefer that, if we must indeed be
subject to their representation in popular culture, they be confined to
small supporting roles in which they play spinster older sisters or
embittered, loveless career women. The idea that we are not only
supposed to pretend that the shriveled harridans we see on the screen
might still engage in the act of sexual intercourse but that we are
supposed to celebrate their enjoyment of such defies both credulity and
good taste.

If you are a woman in your forties (and I’m not even married, to make matters that much more indiscernible) with no plans for children, many people will think you are selfish, or will assume that you are infertile and sad. But most will not even go that far. They will simply fail to imagine that you have a life at all. A nothingness will appear where your life might otherwise have been in the narrative that another person’s brain gives to the world and your place in it. A childless woman is defined by lack, as is a childless marriage or an unmarried couple (with or without children). It happens all the time.

There’s that. But Carrie and Big also have a relationship with each other, and that takes work. It takes work not to take each other for granted, to love each other actively instead of passively, and to keep being who you are while also being a person who isn’t single, who is part of a couple. And to do all this while living a life that others, if they see it at all, see as lack. These are all struggles, inasmuch as you have to work to make love, relationships, or your own self “happen,” and life will often make things difficult, as it tends to do.

...

As I left the theater I was mulling all this over, and wondering about
the strangely hostile fever-pitch of the bad reviews… and it hit me in
the stomach all of a suddenlike, that the movie is Miranda in the
workplace. This is not true of every criticism of the movie. There are
plenty of valid reasons not to like it. But my concern, right now, is
that many of the reviews, whether authored by men or women, may
themselves be caught up in a kind of unreflective misogyny—unreflective
because it is so deeply embedded in our culture that it is largely
invisible. It parades around as normal, as justified, as earned. Why
else would the reviews be so full of certainty that these characters are
now bad, bad women who have betrayed their fans. How dare Charlotte not
be perfectly happy with the children she so desperately wanted? How
dare Miranda quit her job because she’s unhappy and rarely sees her son?
How dare Carrie want jewelry instead of a bedroom television as an
anniversary gift? And how dare Samantha want to keep feeling desire?
Such terrible trespasses! Surely they must be punished. And so they are
punished.

But the ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the
smoke from cheap incense. Over cosmos in their private bar, Charlotte
and Miranda commiserate about the hardships of motherhood and then raise
their glasses to moms who “don’t have help,” by which they mean paid
servants.

Not since 1942's Arabian Nights has orientalism been portrayed so
unironically. All Middle Eastern men are shot in a sparkly light with
jingly jangly music just in case you didn't get that these dusky people
are exotic and different. Even leaving aside the question of why anyone
would go on holiday to Abu Dhabi, everyone who has ever watched a TV
show knows that the first rule is: don't take characters out of their
usual environment.

Last night, two friends and I went to see it. We saw it in the Geneva, NY movieplex. It wasn't sold out, but it was full and, yes, women outnumbered the men by at least 12:1. The crowd was appreciative and enthusiastic. Both my friends liked it--and one had hated SATC 1. A bit more background--all 3 of us are over 40, have been married, have had kids. From here on in, there will be a lot of spoilers, so if you want surprises and plan on seeing the movie, stop reading now.

The movie explores fantasy and disappointment (I wonder if the critics saw the movie or even recognize the fantasy components; my god, one of the framing devices is old black and white movies, the first with Clark Gable--It Happened One Night--and the second with Cary Grant--I didn't recognize it; if those don't signal Depression-era escapism, what does?). The television series always had a fantastic element--fantasies of great clothes and apartments on a writer's income, of fulfilling careers, of complete sexual enjoyment. So not only did the series actively invite women to imagine themselves as one of the 4 characters, but it also staged fantasies of fashion, success, romance, and sex. The best episodes pressed the limits of fantasy. Particularly after 9/11 there was increasing pressure to wake up from the dream. One could almost say that the failure of the first film was its inability to resolve or represent the tension between the fantasy of the wedding and the reality of the end of Carrie's life as a single woman.

The two primary sites of fantastic investment in SATC2 are homosexuality and a mythical Middle East. Since 3 of the 4 women are married and Samantha is having a hard time holding onto her mojo (her fight is admirable, making me wonder why fighting cancer is glorified and fighting menopause is roundly condemned; misogyny anyone?), straight love has lost its allure and become a lot of work. Marriage and babies, marriage without babies--not what it was cracked up to be, a giant pain, and not the source of completeness at the heart of their fantasies. With straight marriage on the decline, who can believe in it anymore? Who really wants it, anyway? The gays!!

Gay marriage is the one cultural site where marriage means something. Weddings can be over the top (there really is something to celebrate) and maybe the rules are different, easier to renegotiate. The guys' solution to pressure for monogamy--infidelity is only allowed in states that won't recognize their marriage--at first seems a gesture to the fantasy of fabulous, frequent, promiscuous sex in which gay men are often cast, yet the explanation--it's not because he's gay, it's because he's Italian--situates the solution back within one of the main issues of the movie, how will the women deal with being with the same person, in the same bed, most every night, FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. It's like a prison sentence, a kind of capture, maybe even a form of cultural silencing.

So, the wedding is totally over the top--more perfect than any wedding ever, complete with swans, a gorgeous men's chorus in white, and Liza. Liza's rendition of "Single Ladies" was unlike anything I've ever seen. The closest I can come up with is Tom Delay on Dancing with the Stars.

So, Liza does Beyonce, Carries wears a Tux, and a cute man flirts with Big. Safely enveloped in gay fabulousity, even the most stilted interactions can be a little wonderful. But life isn't a great big gay wedding. Miranda has an asshole of a boss who makes her life miserable. Charlotte is cracking under the pressure of cheerfully acting like some Betty Crocker ideal of total mommy completion. Carrie is frustrated by the everyday-ness of married life: after the apartment is decorated, then what? And, as mentioned, Samantha is courageously pursuing experimental vitamin treatments for menopause.

This is one of the first places where the reviews miss. Critics say the women are bling obsessed--false. There is no bling obsession, if bling means jewelry. Carrie says that Big could have gotten her a ring as an anniversary present, but that's as a counter to the television in the bedroom, not a statement about jewelry. Charlotte gets upset because her daughter apparently ruins a vintage designer skirt, but, again, this isn't about the clothes per se--it's about Charlotte's stressed out enfrazzlement with cupcakes, a screaming baby, and another kid insisting on attention at exactly that moment. Critics say that the women's careers have been sidelined: wrong again. Miranda doesn't quit her job to stay at home and be a mom--she quits because her boss is a jerk and she can find something better. Carrie goes to her old apartment to work on her writing, has a book come out, and stresses over a bad review. Work matters--to them. And the whole trip to Abu Dhabi is connected to Samantha's job as a publicist.

The second site of fantastic investment is Abu Dhabi. It's not portrayed ironically because it is portrayed fantastically. It relies on Orientalist fantasies stretched into camp. The shift in setting works because it enacts the change in NYC as a figure for fantasy: NYC can't or doesn't function in the same way it used to (in the show, perhaps in the world). It's not invincible; it's not ideal. It doesn't welcome anyone from anywhere. It's harder to make it. But the Middle East, in this fantasy, has unfathomably rich sheiks; they build new sparkling cities; they attract money, fame, luster. Just like the women's old dreams of romance, sex, fashion, and success don't fit the realities of their lives as straight middle aged women, NY has lots it magical allure.

So, enter Lawrence of Arabia style fantasy, complete Orientalist escapism (including camels, a gorgeous man riding a jeep over sand dunes, World Cup finalists showing off their abs in the pool). Everything is completely over the top--and we know from the beginning that they don't have to pay for it (even their 13 hour plane trip is the fantastic air travel promised in the 60s and now the privilege of our global financial overlords). They are guests. They get 4 cars, 4 butlers (completely hot and also continuing the fantastic element of hot gay men). The hotel and their suite was so over the top that it made me think of old Marx brothers films where the guys find themselves in luxurious environments that will ultimately become the setting for mad cap adventures.

Of course, the fantasy can't hold up under any scrutiny. We learn that one of the butlers is Indian and has to work months at a time to save money to go home to see his wife. I guess the reviewer who mentioned unexamined privilege was in the bathroom during that scene.

I wonder if that same reviewer is over 25--I doubt it. She didn't get at all the scene between Miranda and Charlotte where they talk about how much it sucks to be a mom. Do reviewers not want to hear this? Do they want to think that it's really fulfilling to spend hours on end with crying kids? In the scene, Miranda helps Charlotte to be more honest with herself, to let go of the fantasy that motherhood provides serenity and completeness. Before each hard admission, they take another drink. And they let go of the guilt and the pressure and the illusion. Really this is the ideal drinking game and the mommies in my small town multiplex loved it (Miranda was my hero throughout the whole thing). The reviewer slams the film for an implicit elitism when they raise their glasses to women without help. The moms of Geneva, NY--most of us who get help where we can find it, from friends, from neighbors, from relatives, from paid day care providers when we can afford it and when there are openings in the few available places--raised our imaginary cosmopolitans and toasted right back.

The fantasy also can't bear up under the tensions over the veil--choice? tradition? custom? oppression? In fact, grappling with restrictions around dress and sexuality becomes one of the central problems the 4 women encounter during their visit. While the other 3 seem to want to 'respect local customs,' Samantha is having none of it. She's not a good girl in the US and she isn't going to be one here. And, as usual, she pays a price for her sexuality: the scene where she is on the ground in shorts and a tank top, her purse broken and her condoms and other belongings strewn all about, sweaty with messy hair, messy make up, exhausted, hungry, menopausal, furious and surrounded by robed men (they looked like sheiks to me) yelling and condemning her seemed one moment before a public stoning. She was close to humiliation, but fighting it, not giving in.

In fact, Samantha's sexuality, her fierce commitment to her own
enjoyment, ruptures the fantasy Abu Dhabi and opens their way back home:
because she is charged with open displays of sexuality, she loses the
business opportunity and the women have to either pay for the hotel
themselves or leave; at 22 k a night, they have to leave (of course they
can't afford this!); and now instead of 4 nice cars, they have trouble
getting even a couple of pretty crappy taxis. They don't look
particularly glamorous, either.

Some might say the movie tries to make Samantha stand in for all women, for the true woman behind the veil, and thus for a universal feminine against patriarchal sexual oppression. Such a reading makes a kind of liberal capitalist subject into the universal subject. It makes sense given the scene that follows: a group of women in abayas rescue Samantha et al. Of course they are all wearing cutting edge designer clothes under their abayas. And, like Samantha, they are reading Suzanne Sommer's book on dealing with menopause. Women across the world are united in their love of shopping, good clothes, and courageous battle over hormones. Unsurprisingly, the four heroines themselves have to put on the robes in order to escape from their predicament and get their first class seats for the flight home. The veil is a vehicle for escape as well as capture.

The fantasy of underneath it all women are basically the same, the liberal feminist message, also drives one of the most difficult scenes: the four heroines karaoke performance of "I am Woman." It's a nice parallel to Liza's "Single Ladies." On the one hand, the cringe factor is nearly as strong. On the other, the almost unbearable cheesiness and absence of irony actually lets a sincere aspiration shine through. The camera moves to the different faces of the women in the audience--heavy, older, global (although clearly all wealthy), to the heroines, to the belly dancers now doing some kind of weird muscle man dance, to the soccer players flaunting their 12 packs. It's too strained to be joyous or even emancipatory. But they persevere, nonetheless. They don't flee into the safety of irony but actually persist in a kind of stand, a kind of fierce insistence --"I am woman." The truth of the anthem is realized in its liberal capitalist form, but that doesn't make it less of a truth (ideology always has to include an element of truth).

The film wakes up from its Middle Eastern fantasy into the fantasy of liberal feminism (gay salvation remains: Charlotte is saved from her fear that her husband might have an affair with her buxom Irish nanny by the nanny's lesbianism). It's still a fantasy and maybe even the notion that this the biggest thing the women have to deal with is the biggest fantasy of all. But it rattles the supposition that having it all is possible, it addresses disappointments and pressures, and it guarantees that finding a straight man and settling into straight domesticity is not a sure path to happiness. Since that fantasy is the primary motor of the chic flick, disrupting it is pretty satisfying. Friendship, connection with other women, is a much better fantasy.

November 06, 2009

I've been in California. A student challenged me on one of my typical appropriations of Zizek, this time the one that says something to the effect that we have to reinvent our modes of dreaming.

Leaving aside the unfortunate evocation of Clinton era politics (reinventing government)--which could be mine, but I'm too tired after the red eye back to look it up--there is something impossible (but necessary) about an injunction to dream differently. But maybe that's the point.

Dream.

Wake up.

Dream again.

Dream better.

Our mistake in emphasizing either dreaming or waking is forgetting the connections between the two, their imbrications and links, the way each persists as a gap in the other, and even the way that there are moments when they blur such that we can't tell whether are asleep or awake (then again, this could be simply my extension of the early hours waiting this morning at JFK, neither awake nor asleep).

The nihilism of misplaced realism is the way it remains stuck in wakefulness, as if dreaming were a retreat (Lacan points to how in waking we flee the Real of the dream). Frequently, and with increasing intensity, perhaps as we approach the Real of Capital in today's continued condition of undeniable, unavoidable, crisis and excess, some on the left, hands over their ears and screaming, repeat, repeat, repeat that we've learned that socialism is a dead exercise, that communism is no ideal, that any, any, any evocations of a Party, or discipline, or--heaven forbid--taking over the state and having the state take over the economy are, slap/slam, slap/slam, slap/slam, misplaced dreams.

But maybe that's the point. To place the dreams of communism again in our setting, to reset them, to occupy them and extend them and use them to change and distort what we've woken up to. The same dream in a new setting is not the same dream.

Since I was young, I've dreamt versions of the same dream. It usually involves exploring a house or houses. And in each dream, I remember the previous ones. I know where the rooms lead, where the hidden staircase is, where the scary places are. Each new dream adds something else or each of my wakings is different and so what I recall or accent is different.

In State and Revolution, Lenin makes the withering away of the state depend on the spread of accounting, surveillance, and discipline throughout the population. When society becomes a factory and an office, when the tasks are so simple that anyone can do them, the parascitic elements of the bourgeois-military state are no longer necessary (of course, it goes without saying that this aspect of withering away is only possible after the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state and the establishment of a proletarian state). Too many so-called leftists write today as if we can have the withering away without the revolution, as if the withering away would necessarily be a human withering (or maybe this is why they are so keen on animals and objects; they know full well that this is no human withering at all, that the fundamental edifice of police power protecting the finance sector doesn't and hasn't wither away at all, that humans persist as so much refuse, accumulating as themselves as the new surplus). It's the way that they deny antagonism.

October 22, 2009

When we say that someone did a double take, we are saying that they looked again, looked back. They saw something and rather than assimilating what they saw into the manifold of impressions, they were pushed, impelled, to look at it again. With a double take, it's not that the person chooses or decides to look again, to look back; rather, they find themselves already looking back.

What makes one look again?

A rupture or a glitch, a disconnection or seam, a fault line in the manifold of impressions that, somehow, is more than that manifold. The plenitude of sensory impressions, the multiplicty in which one persists, at that moment exceeds itself. Some kind of excess in the field calls attention to the field.

The Lacanian term for that excess rupturing the field is the gaze. The gaze, then, isn't what the viewer sees; it's what makes her look and become aware that she is looking. The gaze confronts the viewer in her viewing, disturbing it, denaturalizing it, making what was formerly seamless appear with seams, with cuts, with splices.

In a media setting filled with interruptions, with cuts and splices, segments and seques, the gaze, rather than becoming more apparent, retreats. The field itself seems comprised of bits of footage, multiple layers of impressions impressing themselves into layers. Interrupting this field of interruptions thus becomes a challenge: what makes one interruption different from another, what lets it rupture the field of interruptions, what lets it become an opportunity for an encounter with the Real of the gaze rather than simply another moment in the imaginary?

Perhaps because I've been teaching the Republic, perhaps because my thinking looks back more easily than forward (or even around), I wonder if the interruption of the gaze in a field of interruptions depends on something like what Plato describes as a summons--a sensory impression that extends in opposing directions, that impresses a contradiction on the senses, calling forth some need to understand. On the one hand, we could describe this as a lack, insofar as their is a lack of understanding. On the other, it is just as easy to think of the situation as one of surplus, an abundance which pushes the one who senses in conflicting directions.

And the summons can only summon so long as it remains in conflict, opposed. If there is a resolution, the conflict or opposition becomes only apparent, imaginary, and not Real.

In a field of interruptions the gaze manifests itself as an interruption of the interruptions, perhaps as a bracketing that makes us say, 'but wait! there's more' and that in so doing calls us to look back on our looking. What makes this interruption the work of the drive is that we find ourself already lost in it, already having turned.